Pawn Advancing
by Thessaly
Summary: [Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles] Seventeen year old Kuzum pays a visit to the family at Midculter and indulges in extended drabble.  Not much happens: this is more an excuse for me to play in Dunnettland.


_**(A/N)** A little bit of fun. Tom O'Bedlam says the very idea is sacreligious, but I can't help it. It was just too good a plot bunny to pass up. This is based on Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, and I'm afraid it won't make much sense if you haven't read them. Exposition is something that happens to other people. I am fully aware of the flaws of this, so I apologize. I can't help whole-hearted adoration. Unlike Lady Dunnett, I am not an historian and so this has no particular date. You do the math. Right. And I continue on the most Quixotic effort of my career..._

A courtier, a favorite of the Queen and the council, is never alone. As he rode south-west from Edinburgh, cantering over the Cheviots, young Mr. Crawford recognized and appreciated his momentary solitude. He smiled into the crisp, early spring light, and kneed his horse a little faster, a little straighter, towards Stirling and Boghall and, finally, Midculter.

If pressed, he would have been forced to admit that home was the elegant new house on the Lymond property, but most of his childhood had been spent at Flaw Valleys, another half day's ride, or here at Midculter. Midculter…he whistled as he went over the last hill and looked down on the heart of the Crawford family. _This_ was home.

Entering the front gate, he dismounted, tossing his reins to the waiting groomsman. A door from the house burst open with a clatter, and a pretty, dark-haired girl of fifteen flew out and into his arms.

"Kuzum! You're back!" She pulled away. "Why don't you ever _tell_ us when you're going to visit?"

Someone had heard Lucy – someone usually did – for the swarm of Midculter children flowed into the yard, crowding around him. He was Crawford at court; plain Mr. Crawford, and to the few who knew him well, he was Reddin. But his cousins would always call him Kuzum. He had a right, he supposed, to the Lymond title – Master of Lymond, perhaps – but no one had ever tried to use it. There was only one Crawford of Lymond, and he had made the name his own.

He left the elegant sophisticate Reddin behind, and reverted to Kuzum to hug Lucy, and sharp-faced, brown-haired Martha, and small, solemn Alec. He hoisted five-year-old Nicol, just to show he still could. He greeted his two siblings more carefully, promising envious Gideon a fencing practise and glowing Isobel a ride. He liked to look at all of them, the various reflections of a remarkable family. Gideon, with his mother's brown hair and eyes, had a certain grace and precocity which could only have come from his father while Isobel, walking beside him and demanding gossip, was appropriately named for their grandmother. He looked down at her ruffled hair, and smiled, almost without thinking. Of the whole brood, only he and Isobel were fair Crawfords, with the light hair and remarkable eyes. The others were a mix of Richard and Philippa's brown, and Mariotta's black, and Sybilla's pale gold. Surrounded by children, he was convinced that he was home.

He found the parents in the large solar upstairs. Mariotta, plump and pretty and possessing a calmness her eldest daughter had still not learned, waited with open arms, and Kuzum greeted her, contented to see that some things at Midculter never changed. Richard, brown and stocky and patriarchal, was also there to clap his nephew on the shoulder. It was not until Mariotta had taken the children away that Richard looked at Kuzum and said only, "And my son?"

"Her highness was unwilling to give him leave," said Kuzum. "I have letters for both of you." He did not have to say to Richard that Mary Stuart would deny to the son of Crawford of Culter what she would grant the child of Crawford of Lymond. He did not have to say that the scion of solidly reliable family would remain tied to court for the foreseeable future, while the son of the scapegrace brother received anything he wanted. Richard knew that. Richard had always known.

Then Kuzum knelt down beside the chair by the window to greet Sybilla, the great lady of Midculter. She looked as she always had, chic and delicate and serene. She was so frail, he thought, as his lips brushed her cheek. Someday she would float away in a gust of wind and they would be left behind to grieve. Though it seemed impossible that his grandmother would ever disappear. She touched his hair lightly.

"Kuzum," she said, and her eyes were identical copies of his father's, of Isobel's. "Hello, my lambkin." There was a moment, for peace and the comfort of home. Then Sybilla smiled. "You're a very good boy. I should think you'll find them in the north tower."

He smiled, and went. The north tower had once, he remembered vaguely, been another spare, circular room, until it had been fitted up as a music room with the instruments that Sybilla and her progeny loved. He paused outside the door, listening to the music, aware that he had caught them in a rare moment of relaxation. Someone was playing the lute, a gaudy, ornamented melody, accompanied by a wry spinnet continuo, elaborating, supporting that captivating melody line. Kuzum waited until the duet trailed off into laughter and a few merry chords before lifting his hand and knocking. Philippa was seated at the spinet, facing away from the keyboard. Francis Crawford, her husband and Kuzum's formidable father, faced her, lute held loosely in one hand, the other lying open on his knee. He looked up as Kuzum entered. Philippa jumped to her feet and came over to hug him. She was shorter than he remembered – or perhaps he was taller – but still the same Philippa. The same brown eyes and hair, and smile, touched with a dry humour. The same Philippa he remembered from all of his peripatetic childhood.

And then his father, who rose, lightly, to greet Kuzum. Francis Crawford, ageless and elegant and captivating. "Hello, sir," said Kuzum. His father smiled.

And Philippa quietly turned away. Some reunions were better held in private. Later, she would hear whatever news Kuzum brought from court, but for now, they did not need her.

Kuzum let himself be quietly absorbed into the routine of Midculter, with its houses and barns and tenants and music and laughter, always laughter. He went riding with both siblings, he spoke the Turkish he had not quite forgotten with Philippa, who had also not quite forgotten it. He enjoyed himself. Midculter, tucked away in its pastoral niche, was out of the path of the exhausting changes at court. Kuzum had been about ten when the Queen had married Darnley, but he remembered the prolonged visit to Ireland with horrified amusement now that he understood the politics inherent.

The single sour note came soon after his return and it was not so much a sour note as a manifestation of something that had always disquieted him. It began, of course, with another scene he walked into; he wondered sometimes how many times he had disrupted things simply by his presence, by being in one place at a certain time. In this case, he walked into the solar and paused in the door way, seeing Lymond and Gideon playing chess. "Well?" said Francis Crawford, watching his younger son.

Gideon surveyed the board with brown eyes, active in a delicately cast face. Then he lifted one exquisitely-shaped hand and moved. His father shifted a pawn forward to the last square on the opposite side, and said, "You are not paying attention. A knight, I think. Unless you have any particular reason for saving that pawn, dispose of it." Gideon, relinquishing the knight, nodded. Then he looked up, and smiled. "Hello, Kuzum."

The other player turned, slowly. Kuzum saw all the muscles along his jaw tighten before he looked away and Kuzum shivered with a little premonition and a little finger-touch of worry. "I didn't mean - " he began, then stopped. "Excuse me."

Philippa found him later, halfway down the back spiral staircase, hugging his knees and staring at the steps. She touched his shoulder.

"What is it?" she said.

"I - " Kuzum began. "I didn't know he played chess."

Philippa, who had some idea of what had happened, said, "Ah. Yes, he does. Very well."

Kuzum finally looked up, faint anguish in his cornflower blue eyes. "Then why did he never play with me?"

Philippa reached over and put her arms around her son. The boy who was almost all her son and still not quite grown up. "I think," she said carefully, "that you should ask him before you go back."

"Couldn't you tell me?"

Philippa did, in fact, know the precise reason that Francis Crawford refused to play chess with his elder son. "It's not my story, Kuzum," she said, and he didn't answer. She looked at the light walls of the staircase and sighed. _Must we go through the questioning of legitimacy every generation_, she asked herself. _We barely survived it the last time._

She let Kuzum go. He deserved to be told his history and it was perhaps better done now than later, but…it would be hard. Philippa stood up and went to find Sybilla. Later, perhaps, they could all talk. Later, before Kuzum went back to court. Kuzum. She sighed. No matter how much he grew and changed, he was still the plump, smiling child from Topkapi. Still a pawn, though perhaps a pawn with a will of its own. They would have to see, she and Francis; have to watch their child play his own game. He'll do well enough, she thought, coming into the light-flooded solar, bright with Sybilla's embroidery and Lucy's sweet voice. He's ours, if not by birth, then by rights and heritage. He's a Crawford.


End file.
